Of course, many of them have been up for a while. I just realized that many MORE of them were now up because Anastasia from Ypulse mentioned her panel’s were there now. Regardless, download them and enjoy!
I am excited because there are a few that I didn’t get to see…
Bill Johnston had a great couple of posts on Where does Community fit within an organization. You should read it, he quotes me. 
The timing couldn’t be much better for InterActiveCorp to launch Zwinktopia, a new virtual world for young teens. Other virtual worlds, such as Gaia, Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, Neopets, Club Penguin, Webkinz and others, are exploding in terms of unique monthly visitors and total time spent at the sites.Until today, IAC’s Zwinky was a site to make customized avatars, choosing from 10,000 different outfits, accesories and other items, and embed them onto other websites such as MySpace. Users could also become friends with other users and enage in basic social networking activities. See Stardoll as well in this space.Most of the functionality at Zwinky is accessed via a non-mandatory browser toolbar that users install. Zwinky says that they have 20 million active toolbars that were used in March 2007. Part of Zwinky’s business model is to collect search advertising revenues from toolbar usage.
Today Zwinky will add a virtual world to the site called Zwinktopia – users can use their avatars to roam around the world, chat with other users and engage in activities to earn Zbucks, the virtual currency of Zwinktopia. Zbucks can be used to buy virtual clothing and other goods.
Zwinky is part of the Fun Webs group at IAC, which includes Smiley Central, Cursor Mania and other sites and generates over $100 million in annual revenues. The Fun Webs group is part of the Consumer Applications and Portals group (iWon and Excite are within this group) and is led by Scott Garell.
Zwinky alone has 4.7 million worldwide unique visitors in March (Comscore), far more than Second Life and the other competitors listed in the first paragraph above. If a reasonable number of them can be converted into exploring Zwinktopia, it will become the largest immersive world outside of the gaming sites like World of Warcraft. See Comscore comparision data below (U.S. only).
See GigaOm’s recent article on Gaia, which is probably closest to Zwinktopia in functionality.
IAC Launches Zwinktopia At Peak of Virtual World Hype
Definitely go to this linked article to see the stats in comparision to gaionline.com, cyworld, and habbo. And the commercial…
*******
Just saw the commercial on primte time! wow. and in tiny little words in the bottom corner it said the site is free with a toolbar.
technorati tags:club penguin, tween, disney, kids, Nick, kids, webkinz
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::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon » Waterfall bad, Washing Machine good for teams, too
This is a great slide show on traditional workflow versus the agle development workflow ideologies. Tara then discusses how the mindset can be translated across disciplines as well.
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Communispace just published new research that found that up to 86 percent of the people in private online communities participate, and just 14 percent lurk. Compare that to studies of public social networks where just one percent participate, and 99 percent lurk.The researchers looked at the behavior among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities.
The Future of Communities Blog » Blog Archive » New research: participants vs. lurkers
Month old, but just read it. Interesting statistic that I am sure to use.
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I can’t wait to show this to everyone I know not using a reader yet. Thanks Lee and Sachi!
I use Netvibes, btw. – Joi
There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.
I was once affectionately known, not that long ago, as “Chart Girl” for my affinity for the visual representation of data. I like charts (excel is my friend) and making data pretty.
So imagine how happy I was to read in Online Fandom today about the new site, Many Eyes. You can take any text or data file and make it into a tag cloud, bubble chart, pie chart, etc. Here is one of my favs, a tag cloud of the Gonzales trial. His fav phrase “I don’t recall” is quite large, eh?
I will definitely be playing on here more…
2. As Diane Winston explained during her opening remarks at the Forum, Evangelical Christians have been key innovators in their use of emerging media technologies, tapping every available channel in their effort to spread the Gospel around the world. I often tell students that the history of new media has been shaped again and again by four key innovative groups — evangelists, pornographers, advertisers, and politicians, each of whom is constantly looking for new ways to interface with their public.
3. Anyone who wants to understand how niche media works in this country needs to understand what’s going on in Christian media. It’s hard to call Christians a subculture when most studies suggest that the vast majority of Americans claim some religious faith and most claim to belong to some mainstream Christian denomination. Yet, because the most hardcore members of these groups feel alienated from much of commercial popular culture, they have created their own alternative cultural sphere — producing their own television programs, films,music, games, magazines, comics, you name it. We can learn a lot by studying the strategies by which this alternative popular culture is produced, distributed, and consumed, often depending heavily on viral marketing to get the word out without having to rely on mainstream media channels.
When Christian music started to get big in the 90′s and then went mainstream in the 2000′s, I took notice to the impact of Evangelican culture on popular culture. Love that Henry Jenkins is covering this topic.
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Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictability is inherent to the nature of the market. It cannot be eliminated either by accumulating more information — about people or songs — or by developing fancier prediction algorithms, any more than you can repeatedly roll sixes no matter how carefully you try to throw the die.
Justin Timberlake – Culture – Hollywood – Idea Lab – New York Times
Very cool article about examining how to predict “big hits” in pop culture. The author’s references are primarily from a research study he did setting up an online music source and different controlled areas to track whetehr other user’s choices impacted whether an unknown artists songs succeeded or not.
I especially like the insistance on the role of early adopters and how their early remarks only grow influence with time. I take that as an underscore to habit of appealing to the early adopters, whetehr they are in an industry or the existing fan base.
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Finally almost caught up on at least TWiT. Still have tons of blogs to read. Last time I take a vacation, oy! Again, forgive me if some of these topics are a couple weeks old – they are but days old to me.
There has been a great deal of talk about using Second Life or other immersive virtual worlds as vehicles to partner with to market brands to kids and teens. The owners of the virtual worlds seem open to it.
At the recent Virtual Worlds Conference, Steve Youngwood of MTV, said that MTV’s Interactive division, who has had Virtual Laguna Beach and The Hills running for over 6 months, has seen 99%
of their users who were exposed to brands in their virtual worlds go
on to use those products within the next 2 weeks. That is a pretty impressive
statistic (no mention was made of their younger demo offerings at Nicktropolis).
Privacy and moderation issues aside for a moment, I think a bit more thought is needed before everyone runs into these kid/teenworlds. Tons of care and consideration needs to be put into how a brand is added to any kind of community, but especially a virtual world. There has been considerable of backlash from the Second Life “residents” about the corporate influence and even evolving into groups like a SL Liberaton Army which aim to fight the recent sponsors that have set up shop, most of which are very “corporate” in nature.
In the same Virtual Worlds Conference keynote I mentioned above, Matt Bostwick of MTV talked about the considerations that they took when adding brands to Virtual Laguna Beach and The Hills. He used the term 4D branding to describe making the brand’s the experience and interaction with the brand on a deeper level. He mentioned the recent success of a Pepsi campaign that worked really well with the Virtual Hollywood Hills residents, where different types of immersive Pepsi marketing were occuring simultaneously throughout the world – from purchasing cans of virtual Pepsi from vending machines to sponsored events and games. The promotion resulted in 99% of the their users being exposed to the brand 9 times or more and satellite Pepsi fan groups appearing organically with fan activity.
Both examples, Second Life and Virtual Hills, tried to integrate a corporate sponsor into their worlds with very different results. The difference is the level of consideration each world gave to how the users would react to the brand integration. Second Life has a fanastical world where a corporate presence would be a huge contrast to the culture that was already established. I am sure it is harder for Second Life marketers to develop campaigns that won’t rub their residents the wrong way – but I am sure it is possible, if not done already. Whereas, Virtual Hills is tailor made for corporate sponsorships; it’s residents being raised on a steady diet of corporate branding from almost birth (their target demo is 20 y.o. females).
It will be interesting to watch the next year unfold. I still stand by my earlier claim that I don’t think virtual economy’s that are fueled by actual cash will work for the under 13 y.o.’s demo the way it worked in S Korea with Cyworld. Habbo is selling their cards at CVS’s, so we will see if I have to eat my words.
I do think that there is tremendous opportunity for respectful brand integration into virtual worlds where the users have a meaningful connection with the product and the brands see the power that this new generation of community holds.
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